The Substance-Free Substance of the Debate

Peter Suderman of Reason magazine tweeted last night that "This debate was
wonkier and more substantive than any of the 2008 debates."

In a sense, he's right: President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt
Romney got into the weeds on tax policy and discussed the differences between
their Medicare reform plans in detail. They even got a bit granular on financial
regulation, a topic that risks making voters' eyes glaze over.

But while the debate was long on policy specifics, it provided no guidance on
the three most important economic issues that the president will face in
2013.

1. The candidates didn't talk about the fiscal cliff, or its individual
components -- the payroll tax holiday, extended unemployment benefits, the
expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and sequestration.

2. They didn't talk about monetary policy.

3. They didn't talk about housing, except for a brief argument from Romney
that slow implementation of Dodd-Frank regulations has hurt the mortgage
market.

The candidates spent a lot of time talking about how important job creation
is. But the three issues above will all have greater effects on job growth in
2013 or 2014 than tax reform, Medicare or any of the other subjects that got the
extended treatment in last night's debate.

Partly, this reflects the press's obsession with the long-term deficit: Jim
Lehrer wasted a question on this topic, which has already been discussed to
death, when he could have pressed for new answers on the economic crisis we face
today.

But the open format of the debate meant that either candidate could have
easily made a pitch on these issues. Neither Romney nor Obama did so because
neither has a credible plan to generate the job growth we need in the short
term.

Romney keeps touting his promise to create 12 million jobs over four years: a
fairly tepid pace of job growth that likely would not bring unemployment below 6
percent until 2017. That's not good enough coming out of a steep recession. We
need a rebound like in 1984, when we created 3.9 million jobs in just one year,
at a time when the labor force was about a third smaller than it is today.

Obama isn't any stronger on this point. Presumably, if he had any job-
creation ideas that he could get through Congress, or enact without their help,
he would be implementing them now.

Without anything to say about how they will put Americans back to work, the
candidates are left talking about tax policy and Medicare. Yes, they were
talking about substantive policy issues. But they don't deserve a whole lot of
credit for it.

(Josh Barro is lead writer for the Ticker. E-mail him and follow him on
Twitter.)

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